rsync feature suggestion

[Justin Banks]

Dave Dykstra wrote
> What Hadmut wants is the oft-requested and discussed "files-from" option
> that I once offered to write but haven't been able to get to.  Andy Schor
> in http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/rsync/2001-November/005272.html posted
> a patch for something similar but it only worked when the sender was on the
> local machine and not when it was remote (among other issues).  I don't
> believe you've posted your patch, Justin; does your "files-from" directly
> contain the list of files to send and skip the recursive traversal?  If so,
> I don't see the point of having rsync have the extra regex options you
> mention because those could all be done by external greps that pre-process
> the file list.

Mine is also victim to the "sender on the local machine" problem, although 
that could be easily rectified. By default, my files-from doesn't do any
recursive processing, but you can control this on a per-file basis within
the list of filenames. Here's an example :

/a/file
/another/file
/some/directory
/some/other/directory 1

would recurse on /some/other/directory but nothing else. I also made the list
of files base-64 encoded to avoid some obvious problems, and it works with
all filenames (ascii, UTF-N).

-justinb